Birds Sleep in Giraffe Armpits, New Photos Reveal

A yellow-billed oxpecker perches on the head of a giraffe in Botswana's Okavango Delta.

Photograph by Roy Toft, National Geographic Creative

PUBLISHED February 27, 2018

The best way to guarantee breakfast in bed for some small African birds is falling asleep on your dinner plate—even if it's a giraffe's armpit.

Scientists have long known that yellow-billed oxpeckers hang out on massive African mammals like giraffe, water buffalo, and eland during the day—an often beneficial relationship that provides hosts with cleaner, healthier skin. These small brown birds can often be seen perched on top or hanging off the animals, picking through their hair in search of tasty parasites like ticks.

"You look at them on the giraffe and they're just right up in there," says Meredith Palmer, a Ph.D. candidate in behavioral ecology at the University of Minnesota. "It's a very safe, comfortable place for the birds."

Because the yellow-billed oxpecker has a more limited menu, it makes sense that it would keep a closer grip on its daily bread—even if it means sleeping on it.

"Once you find [a host], it's worth just sticking around so it doesn't wander off," she says.

Strange Bedfellows

Yellow-billed oxpeckers nest in trees or other vegetation when it's time to lay their eggs. But the rest of the time they're perfectly happy dangling from a giraffe—sometimes, seven birds are seen clustered in a single armpit.

Tiffany Plantan, who has studied oxpeckers but was not involved in Palmer's study, praised the paper, saying "this is, as far as I know, the first study examining these birds' behavior at night."

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"It's opening the door for a whole slew of questions that can be asked, particularly between the differences between the two species of oxpeckers and their nocturnal behavior," says Plantan, an ecologist at the University of Miami. (Read why birds matter in National Geographic magazine.)

She has seen red-billed oxpeckers take naps on buffalo and other animals during the day, but she had never seen the behavior at night. Likewise, the Serengeti camera traps have also not caught red-billed oxpeckers roosting on their hosts.

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Yellow-billed oxpeckers sit on the head of a water buffalo.

Photograph by Beverly Joubert, National Geographic Creative

Another difference is that red-billed oxpeckers have smaller, more scissor-like beaks than yellow bills, which enables each species to eat different tick species.

Side Dish of Snot

The birds' palates don't consist only of blood-sucking parasites, however. Oxpeckers feast on a whole range of their hosts' bodily fluids, including mucus, blood, and even snot.